Memories and Adventures Chapter 2 - Under the Jesuits

**Arthur Conan Doyle** (0:01)
Chapter 2 of Memories and Adventures by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
Under the Jesuits Preparatory school The mistakes of education Spartan schooling Corporal punishment Well-known school fellows Gloomy forecasts Poetry London matriculation German school A happy year The Jesuits Strange arrival in Paris I was in my tenth year when I was sent to Hodder, which is the preparatory school for Stonyhurst, the big Roman Catholic public school in Lancashire.
It was a long journey for a little boy who had never been away from home before, and I felt very lonesome and wept bitterly upon the way, but in due time I arrived safely at Preston, which was then the nearest station, and with many other small boys and our black-robed Jesuit guardians, we drove some twelve miles to the school. Hodder is about a mile from Stonyhurst, and as all the boys there are youngsters under twelve, it forms a very useful institution, breaking a lad into school ways before he mixes with the big fellows. I had two years at Hodder. The year was not broken up by the frequent holidays which illuminate the present educational period. Save for six weeks each summer, one never left the school. On the whole, those first two years were happy years. I could hold my own both in brain and in strength with my comrades. I was fortunate enough to get under the care of a kind principle, one Father Cassidy, who is more human than Jesuits usually are. I've always kept a warm remembrance of this man and of his gentle ways to the little boys, young rascals, many of us, who were committed to his care. I remember the Franco-German war breaking out at this period and how it made a ripple even in our secluded backwater. From Hodder, I passed on to Stonyhurst, that grand medieval dwelling house, which was left some hundred and fifty years ago to the Jesuits, who brought over their whole teaching staff from some college in Holland in order to carry it on as a public school. The general curriculum, like the building, was medieval but sound. I understand it has been modernised since. There were seven classes, elements, figures, rudiments, grammar, syntax, poetry and rhetoric and you were allotted a year for each, or seven in all. The course with which I faithfully complied to having already been completed at Hodder.
It was the usual public school routine of Euclid, Algebra and the Classics taught in the usual way, which is calculated to leave a lasting abhorrence of these subjects. To give boys a little slab of Virgil or Homer with no general idea as to what it is all about, or what the Classical Age was like, is surely an absurd way of treating the subject. I am sure that an intelligent boy could learn more by reading a good translation of Homer for a week than by a year's study of the original, as it is usually carried out. It was no worse at Stonyhurst than at any other school, and it can only be excused on the plea that any exercise, however stupid in itself, forms a sort of mental dumbbell by which one can improve one's mind. It is, I think, a thoroughly theory.
I can say with truth that my Latin and Greek, which cost me so many weary hours, have been little used to me in life, and that my mathematics have been no use at all.
On the other hand, some things which I picked up almost by accident, the art of reading aloud, learned when my mother was knitting, or the reading of French books, learned by spelling out the captions of the Jules Verne illustrations, have been of the greatest possible service. My classical education left me with a horror of the classics, and I was astonished to find how fascinating they were when I read them in a reasonable manner in later years. Year by year then, I see myself climbing those seven weary steps and passing through as many stages of my boyhood. I do not know if the Jesuit system of education is good or not. I would need to have tried another system as well before I could answer that. On the whole, it was justified by results, for I think it turned out as decent a set of young fellows as any other school would do. In spite of a large infusion of foreigners and some disaffected Irish, we were a patriotic crowd and our little pulse beat time with the heart of the nation.
I am told that the average of VCs and DSOs, now held by old Stonyhurst boys, is very high as compared with other schools.
Jesuit teachers have no trust in human nature, and perhaps they are justified. We were never allowed for an instant to be alone with each other, and I think that the immorality which is rife in public schools was at a minimum in consequence. In our games and our walks the priests always took part, and the master perambulated the dormitories at night. Such a system may weaken self-respect and self-help, but it at least minimizes temptation and scandal.